Let's start with the subtitle:
It’s time to redirect the billions being squandered in fusion energy and invest in solutions to the climate crisis that actually work
This is objectively false -- The Independent is a British newspaper and the article immediately references the JET reactor, so I'm very safe in my assumption that Donnachadh is going off UK funding figures. The UK earmarked only £126 million for fusion in 20221.
Even going by global figures, the Fusion Industry Association reported $1.4 billion in global investment in 2022, bringing total investment in the field to $6.21 billion (nice). Whilst this may seem to lend credence to Donnachadh's claim, these are global figures for private laboratories, many of which will have goals other than exploiting fusion for power production. Make a note of this point, by the way; it will be important later.
Not off to a great start. Let's go to the first sentence of the article.
It is time to end the fusion delusion. Last week, there were headlines (again) about a “major breakthrough” in the search for unlimited, cheap, carbon-free electricity from nuclear fusion reactors.
Contrary to popular belief, "major breakthrough" does not equal "we did it, guys" -- it means a significant engineering challenge was overcome or a milestone was accomplished. Add a healthy dose of sensationalism from publications such as The Independent (not the scientists and engineers in the field), and any claims of delusion fall flat. Next.
Breathless announcements suggested that the UK’s 38-year-old JET Fusion programme had finally produced 11 megawatts of heat energy for five seconds. To the average person on the street that sounded impressive.
But it equates to the energy needed to boil a measly 60 kettles.
The JET (or Joint European Torus) reactor was never intended to be a viable power plant, or even realistically expected to break even. It was built for the sole purpose of preliminary research into larger Tokamak reactor designs2 that would inform the design and construction of its successor, ITER (the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor). ITER is intended to break even, but is similarly intended to be a technology demonstration and will likely not put any power out to the grid. DEMO, ITER's successor, is intended to demonstrate commercial viability.
In short, remember that point earlier? Yeah, JET was never intended to be a power reactor. Next.
The sad truth is that they [the UK Atomic Energy Agency] admitted that they actually had to put 40 MW of heat into the plasma to produce 11 MW of sustained fusion heat for five seconds. They added: “It is no secret JET uses a lot of energy. It was designed in the 1970s with copper magnets and will soon pass the baton to more energy-efficient experiments.
See above, and also add the UKAEA's point of decades-old designs and hardware. Modern reactor designs, such as MIT and Commonwealth Fusion Systems' SPARC project, use Yttrium-Barium-Copper Oxide superconducting magnets, providing much stronger magnetic fields at significantly reduced power cost. Copper electromagnets were simply never designed for these applications, and the engineers who designed JET were well aware of this. The UKAEA is even explicitly telling you that JET was intended as a stepping stone.
They went on: “ITER, the larger and more advanced upgrade in France, will use superconducting magnets to drastically lower the energy cost [...] ITER aims to release 500 MW of fusion heat using only 50 MW of external heating, and if you consider the power consumption of this entire experimental facility, it will break even.”
The italics [bolded] are mine – this hugely expensive new fusion experiment is not expected to produce a single net kWh of electricity.
Assuming the traditional setup of steam turbines to convert thermal energy to electrical, 10% is an extremely pessimistic efficiency rating for modern boiler and turbine setups3. In reality, ITER is likely to generate an electrical net gain, however it will not output any power to the grid; this is by design, as once again, ITER is not intended for power production4. Next.
Thus, after literally a hundred years of research, since Arthur Eddington first postulated that nuclear fusion could be the stellar energy source, and untold billions of pounds invested by various governments ever since to try and replicate the creation of a mini star on earth, we still cannot produce a single net kWh of energy.
The fusion “industry” is always promising us unlimited clean energy in two to three decades time, but the cruel truth is that despite yet another annual flurry of “breakthrough” headlines, the fusion Holy Grail remains as illusory as the Grail itself.
Not sure why you put "industry" in quotations like that, but go off, I guess. Fusion - until very recently - has been underfunded to a point that undershoots even the most pessimistic research projections. Here's the referenced paper. Try cutting your own wage to a quarter of what it is now, and tell us how it went in a few decades.
Despite all these wasted billions, Boris Johnson’s government, as part of its supposed “10 Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution”, stated: “Our ambition is to be the first country to commercialise fusion energy, enabling low carbon and continuous power generation.”
It pledged another £222m for the spherical tokamak programme which “aims” to build the world’s first commercially viable fusion power plant by 2040, and another £184m to help found a global hub for fusion innovation in the UK.
If you believe that any promise made by Boris Johnson's government holds any value, he has a bridge to sell you, he 100% ab-so-lute-ly pinkie promised the NHS will get that extra £350 million a week in funding starting any day now, HS2 is nearing completion, and Brexit is going just great. No notes.
But in response to an excited BBC interviewer asking a fusion spokesperson when she might be able to boil her kettle with fusion energy, they said possibly in the 2050s. So, two years after the Johnson 2040 fusion promise, the delivery date is again delayed to three decades hence at the earliest.
Told you so.
But behind the headlines lies another really dirty truth about the UK AEA fusion experiments. Over just the last four years, it has consumed an eye-watering 232 million kWh of electricity to run its projects.
Let's just simplify that (and round up) to 240GWh real quick. Oh, and divide by 4, as you took a figure from over four years, so 60GWh. The UK's iron and steel industry -- noted for being on a sharp decline -- used 2.23TWh in 2022 alone (source); almost 10x the fusion sector's power consumption over your entire four year figure. Steel production is also noted for its CO2 production, an issue that could be mitigated with Electric Arc Furnaces powered by clean sources. Yes, that includes wind and solar, though fusion would provide a more compact solution that can provide power on-site.
Not a single kilowatt of the electricity used was from a renewable energy supplier.
Citation needed.
It also consumed 23 million kWh of fossil fuel gas [...]
Where did the other 90% of the 232GWh figure come from?
Over £0.5billion has been poured into the AEA fusion project over the last three years alone, with £100s of millions more planned over the coming decades.
A far cry from the "billions" you decried being "squandered" in the field.
Just this three year AEA budget would have insulated the roofs of 1.6 million poor people’s homes and thus reduced their heating bills and heating carbon emissions by 25 per cent. It costs just £300 to insulate the average semi-detached roof.
So could even a fraction of the cost of Brexit, or HS2, or the £4 billion of unsuitable PPE bought at the beginning of the pandemic. We could even take the money out of existing fossil fuel subsidies.
Even if fusion can eventually produce more electricity than that required to run the fusion plant, it is likely to be far more expensive than using renewables, energy efficiency and storage to eliminate carbon emissions.
A valid point. However, it is disingenuous to pretend the intent is to wholly fulfil our energy needs with fusion. Fusion can, however, fulfil the same niche as fission power plants (that being a compact, energy dense source), and for even heavier applications such as steel industries and possibly even desalination for clean water production.
Daniel Jassby spent 25 years as a senior fusion researcher at the Princeton Plasma Research Laboratory. In a shocking expose for the Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists, he explained that even if an operating plant were successfully launched, it would require mind-boggling amounts of water to cool it and a large labour force to keep it operational and safe.
Hang on, let's grab the quote from Jassby's linked article here:
In addition, there are the problems of coolant demands and poor water efficiency. A fusion reactor is a thermal power plant that would place immense demands on water resources for the secondary cooling loop that generates steam, as well as for removing heat from other reactor subsystems such as cryogenic refrigerators and pumps. Worse, the several hundred megawatts or more of thermal power that must be generated solely to satisfy the two classes of parasitic electric power drain places additional demand on water resources for cooling that is not faced by any other type of thermoelectric power plant.
Okay, that's a lot to unpack -- first of all, I don't doubt Jassby's qualifications, but purely from an engineering point of view, using water to cool anything to cryogenic temperatures is completely batshit insane; cryogenic cooling would use a closed loop of either liquid Nitrogen, or considering the target temperatures of only a few dozen Kelvin, more likely liquid Helium. This is supported by contemporary reactor designs, such as ITER.
Water would, however, be used to pull heat away from the assembly as a whole to produce steam and drive a turbine, as we already do with fission reactors. The extra thermal power generated to satisfy electrical parasitism would realistically be cycled back into the reactor and used to maintain the reaction -- fusion reactors operate on the principle of heating their fuel, in lieu of using gravity to force it together and fuse as occurs in stars. The water required to satisfy these cooling requirements, overall, whilst "immense" as Jassby put, would be similar to the water requirements of a fission reactor of equal thermal output.
As stated earlier, a fusion reactor could even dedicate a portion of its electrical output to desalination to produce the water it needs, without adversely impacting its local environment; ocean water is plentiful. As for safety, Jassby states:
Corrosion in the heat exchange system, or a breach in the reactor vacuum ducts could result in the release of radioactive tritium into the atmosphere or local water resources. Tritium exchanges with hydrogen to produce tritiated water, which is biologically hazardous. Most fission reactors contain trivial amounts of tritium (less than 1 gram) compared with the kilograms in putative fusion reactors.
Heat exchangers are a solved issue, see fission reactors; they're closed systems that are specifically designed to not allow ingress of radioactive materials. A breach of a fusion reactor's vacuum vessel, however, could cause Tritium excursion. Fusion reactors, however, also similarly contain less than a gram of Tritium at any given moment; in fact, ITER is designed to operate with a total fuel load of less than a gram at a time. I do not know where Jassby is getting this "kilograms" figure.
As an additional note, fusion reactors cannot explode like fission reactors. Any breach of a fusion reactor's vacuum vessel will result in air entering the chamber and removing thermal energy from the fuel, rendering the reaction unsustainable and stopping it in milliseconds. The only real safety concern, as Jassby pointed out, is:
Radiation damage and radioactive waste. [...] The neutron radiation damage in the solid vessel wall is expected to be worse than in fission reactors because of the higher neutron energies. Fusion neutrons knock atoms out of their usual lattice positions, causing swelling and fracturing of the structure. [...] The problem of neutron-degraded structures may be alleviated in fusion reactor concepts where the fusion fuel capsule is enclosed in a one-meter thick liquid lithium sphere or cylinder. But the fuel assemblies themselves will be transformed into tons of radioactive waste to be removed annually from each reactor.
Immediately offset by Jassby saying,
Materials scientists are attempting to develop low-activation structural alloys that would allow discarded reactor materials to qualify as low-level radioactive waste that could be disposed of by shallow land burial.
To this, I would like to add that smart, modular reactor design can minimise the amount of material in spent reactor casings, and the half-life of such materials would be drastically shorter than that of current spent fission products, likely further reduced by low-activation materials.
Quite frankly, I think journalists should have to have at least a GCSE-level understanding of what they're writing about. Donnachadh's article is poorly researched at best, and an insultingly bad hit piece at worst -- in my eyes no better than Greenpeace's continued hatred of nuclear power in any form, which serves only to push us back into using fossil fuels.
Yes, this is a kink account. I also will not tolerate nuclear fusion slander in this household.
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Page 13, Government support for fusion: "We have invested over £700m from 2021/22 to 2024/25 to support the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s (UKAEA) cutting-edge research programmes and facilities and £126m in 2022 to boost UK fusion programmes."
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Page 61 (25 as marked on page), I.1 Objectives of Research with JET: "An important part of the experimental programme will be to use JET to extend to a reactor-like plasma, results obtained and innovations made in smaller apparatus as a part of the general Tokamak programme."
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Page 11, 4.4 Performance Characteristics: "Boilers and steam turbines used for large, central station electric power generation can achieve electrical efficiencies of up to 45 percent HHV though the average efficiency of all units in the field is around 33 percent. [...] Consequently, the electric generation efficiencies for the examples shown are all below 10 percent HHV. However, when the energy value of the steam delivered for process use is considered, the effective electrical efficiency is over 75 percent."
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3) Contribute to the demonstration of the integrated operation of technologies for a fusion power plant: ITER will bridge the gap between today's smaller-scale experimental fusion devices and the demonstration fusion power plants of the future. Scientists will be able to study plasmas under conditions similar to those expected in a future power plant and test technologies such as heating, control, diagnostics, cryogenics and remote maintenance.
